It is the fundamental principle that data and information itself is in the public domain under the copyright law regime. However, along with the protectionism request evidenced by Internet Treaties and DMCA after digitalization trend, the data and inf...
It is the fundamental principle that data and information itself is in the public domain under the copyright law regime. However, along with the protectionism request evidenced by Internet Treaties and DMCA after digitalization trend, the data and information has been kept legally in the digital grids and contract tools suggested by the copyright holders. So, people came to worry about the crumbled copyright law function which fails to sustain ``the research commons`` for the utilization and exploitation of digitalized scientific data especially in the Big Data era. This paper examined the development history and pros and cons of the protection exception clauses in EU Directives, US Copyright Act and Korean Copyright Act out of comparative legal analysis perspectives, and also analyzed the Korean database market structures. Based upon such results, it tried to find more workable solutions for securing the free research environment through free data exploitation under the copyright law regime on global basis. As a conclusion, this paper suggested a uniform safe harbor in the exceptional clauses under the current copyright laws of EU, USA and Korea, first of all, and some additional legal and policy measures to overcome the commercial interests of the dominant scientific database providers in the real market are proposed as well.